For most business, online marketing is a must. It gives you the opportunity to reach a wider audience than any other type of marketing, and at a lower cost. In order to run a successful online marketing campaign, you must educate yourself regarding all the available options.
Advertising Platforms
Online marketing means making the most of the variety of platforms available to you. These include email, social media, content marketing, and web advertising.
1. Email Marketing
Email marketing involves obtaining a list of existing and potential customers so that you can keep in touch with them via email. You may send a monthly or weekly newsletter, or periodically send emails advertising a product or service.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing involves building a following on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram. Once you have a following, you can post messages, images, or videos to draw the attention of your fans to what you have to offer. On sites like Facebook, you can pay to make your post more visible or design a more in-depth advertisement to be shown to your market.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing involves writing articles, blog posts, or reports to entertain or inform your readers. This type of marketing can help build your brand and inspires confidence. All content should be search engine optimized, which means enhancing your content with relevant keywords. You can optimize blog posts, product pages, videos, podcasts, and social media posts, and search engines like Google will display your site when people search for your keywords.
4. Web Advertising
Web advertising involves paying other webmasters to place your ad or banner on their website to display to their visitors. This is a good idea if you can find a website with a large customer base that complements, but is not in competition with, your business. Another component of web advertising is affiliate marketing. Other people sell your product on their websites or through their email newsletters, which gets your product or service in front of people that ordinarily wouldn’t see it. In return for this marketing help, you pay the affiliate a percentage of the profits.
You aren’t limited to just one marketing strategy; you can try them all separately or simultaneously. You may decide that some of them don’t meet your needs at all while others may be more suited for particular marketing needs than others. If you don’t have a lot of extra time, you can pay someone to manage your social media account, run your email campaigns or write search engine optimized content.
Marketing Tips & Tricks
1. Use Quora
Quora is a website created for users to ask questions about a variety of topics. If you own or run a business, you are an expert at something. You can use that expertise to market your business by answering questions. Not only will you help the people asking the questions, but you might get noticed by the media if you post a lengthy, thoughtful response.
2. Use Twitter hashtags
The hashtag was made popular by Twitter and is used to label or tag a word so that similar messages are grouped together and people can find them easily. You can use this to your advantage by creating your own hashtag or making use of a popular one used by someone else.
3. Use other sites
Your content can be displayed in more places than just on your website. Spread your content around by using content aggregators so people can find it wherever they are. Content aggregators you can use to display your content include Technorati, Scoop.it, and Reddit.
4. Consider business size
Any size businesses will benefit from marketing, but they must each approach the task in different ways. Large businesses can take advantage of extravagant marketing campaigns that highlight their brand. Small businesses should also be concerned about the brand but would get better mileage out of emphasizing the uniqueness of their products or their specialized customer service.
